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We live in a world that divides our live between a private life in which we "chose our own values" and a public life that we are to conform to the bureaucracies that shape the deeper patterns of our lives. The state and federal governments watch unify both of these realms according to the "laws" that supposedly keep things "fair." In such settings, morality becomes equated with obedience to the state through their laws. "Is it legal or will it make us vulnerable to a law suit?" become our primary questions.

Even more insidious is what this system does to moral reasoning. "Private" moral reasoning is not seen as rational nor towards a real good, but only an expression of personal preference. Strength of will/personal conviction rather than wisdom becomes primary. Within the bureaucracies, moral reasoning doesn't matter at all except in to learn to conform through obedience. The "deciders," those higher up in the organizational bureaucracy, make the real moral decisions, possibly informed by "moral experts" who help them see the practical implications of the decisions. Such a system excludes the necessity of building moral wisdom from "common folk" like us.

Whereas we are forced to live in such a system as Christians, we cannot let it control us or take away the Spirit's work in us to form us into a holy people, wise and discerning faithfulness to God in Christ in the world. With this background, our readings for this Sunday open up to us.

Deuteronomy 4:1-9

The Deuteronomy passage comes after the recitation of God's guidance of Israel, and before the giving of the law at the edge of the land. It is the "preface" to Moses' second giving of the law. Why is it important not to add or detract from the law? Why would Moses reference the Baal of Peor? What is the time for which Moses is giving the Law? You might want to return to Genesis 12:1-9 to understand the significance of the land as the fulfillment of God's promise to Israel. In this light, one can understand the salvific purpose of the giving the Law. Law does not earn entry into the land; the land is given as a Gift. Law is given to guide the witness of Israel in the land once it has been given. What is the purpose of the giving and keeping of the Law? Does this speak merely of external conformity? Yet can internal wisdom be separated from external conformity? What will the "nations" see in the wisdom of Israel as they keep the Law? Why should we exercise diligence and care in relationship to the Law? Why should we take care to teach it to our children?

Ephesians 6:10-20

One hears in the Ephesians passage that concern, amidst a sinful and fallen world, to remain constant in the faith. Of course, this passage has been taken to separate a "spiritual world" of conflict separate from our "physical, bodily world". But we have to recognize that the spiritual is always manifested IN the physical, as the physical itself has a spiritual END. The physical is never merely an end in itself, nor is it ever merely "neutral" in the forces of shaping for good or evil. Also notice that evil is not passive here, but is seen as invasive, on the attack, influences from which Christians need to protect themselves. Maybe you can share stories where you have discovered this, and how "cosmic powers of this present darkness" seek to naturalize themselves in our lives. It might be good to talk about how life with the poor, engaging directly in the moral decisions making from engaging in the works of mercy, help reveal the "spiritual forces of evil."

Describe the "armor of God". What type of armor is it? For what reason? How is the military imagery shifted by the explicit Christian content of the passage?

Why are we told to pray in the Spirit and for the one enchained for the gospel? How does this position of imprisonment for the gospel help us understand the nature of "this present darkness" stated above? Why should we pray "for the saints"? Why must the author "speak boldly" in the situation?

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

We return back to Mark from our sojourn in John. Describe how Jesus talks to the Pharisees? Is he "nice"? Why or why not? What is important for Jesus here? Before one condemns the Pharisees, one needs to know that such "eating regulations" were required for use in the temple when people met for sacrifices (ie, barbeques). What the Pharisees did was apply the temple regulations outside the temple, and it because a means of social discrimination. You also need to know that we have at times had questions of our Eucharistic practice, hygience, and the poor by some very good persons. Why do you think, and how are they related?

Why does Jesus quote Isaiah? Does Jesus speak again the Law here? It seems to me that Jesus' statement suggests that he saw that the Pharisees interpretation of the Torah forced social distinctions that were legitimate within the temple, but even became "anti-Torah" and anti-Temple when they were generalized outside the temple. How does well-meaning persons through inappropriate generalizations end up using legitimate wisdom to discriminate against the poor?

The passage ends with a saying of Jesus. It again raises the issue of internal and external moral reasoning. Where is the basis of evil? Is it utterly separate from exteral manifestations? Notice that Jesus argues that the external manifestations -- that which comes out -- are evil. Note that Jesus places the problem before intentions: from the heart. In other words, intentions are not the problem, the desires of the heart are. If wrongful desire is our true problem in sin, what is the solution?

How does this help us see the importance of becoming a "wise and discerning people" and "putting on the whole armor of God"? In the world in which we live, how do we open our lives to be re-shaped to live faithful to who we really are in God for the sake of our witness to God and the sanctification of our hearts?

Enjoy the discussion!

Posted by johnwright at 10:00 AM | Comments (3)

The Joshua passage goes with the Gospel passage this week; the Epistle passage fits some, but in its Christological sense -- rather than its emphasis on marriage. In some ways, the Gospel passage, as Kurt Luginbuhl rightfully said last week, continues to build throughout John 6. We are here at the "altar call" so to speak, the human response to the Divine Word. We see here the significance of faith as loyalty as the crucial response of human's to the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. We hear the same call in Joshua as well which foreshadows the Gospel reading very well.

These are beautiful readings.

Joshua 24:1-2a,14-25

The narrative context of Joshua 24 needs emphasized, not merely in Joshua, but in light of Genesis 12:1-9. It might be good to read the Genesis passage to see how this passage climaxes all that has gone on from Genesis 12 on. You could leaf through the territorial allotment of the tribes of Israel that immediate precedes this passage. What is the significance of this setting for the charge to follow?

What is the content of the charge to the people? What is the danger that they are to avoid? What is the role of Joshua's statement before the people respond?

Why is the reason that the people of Israel say that they will remain fauith-full to the Lord, the God of Israel?

The following dialogue is extremely fascinating. As you know, Joshua turn out to be correct in his assessment. How does Israel's denial in fact foreshadow that unfaithfulness that is to follow in the unfolding of their story? Does Joshua argue more with them? How does the scene end?

Ephesians 5:21-33

What is the role of Christ in this passage? How is Christ a model for males and females? How does v. 21 change the teaching of all that follows?

John 6:60-69

Jesus repeats his teaching from before in v. 60. What is the response of "many of his disciples"? Why? As Jesus becomes aware of their complaining, what does he do? Why? Does he seem concerned that they are offended? What is "spirit and life" in the passage? Why does Jesus know that they do "not believe"? Why is the flesh useless without Spirit?

What happens as a result of Jesus' response to the struggling disciples? What is the difference about them and Simon Peter? Does Simon Peter understand everything that is said? What does he have?

Which comes first here? Faith or understanding? What does faith allow? What happens if one loses a vital faith in Jesus Christ at the center of the human response to God's revelation in Jesus? It seems to me that the whole passage has a Eucharistic meaning as the point of the center for the life of disciples, and therefore, Jesus as the center. What happens if this center is lost or seen as just one center among others? How is this passage reminiscent of the Joshua passage?

How does this whole passage relate to the mission of our congregation? What is necessary in our response to sustain the life of the congregation?

Have a wonderful discussion!

Posted by johnwright at 2:54 PM | Comments (3)

The following is a major and lengthy post that comes after much reflection, prayer, and reading over the past months and, particularly, the last few weeks. An essay by Alasdair MacIntrye provides the grist for the mill. MacIntyre writes as a philosopher, but his cultural analysis is so acute and his thought so profoundly shaped by Thomas Aquinas that it is very amendable to the life of the church -- as the work of Stanley Hauerwas shows.

Some call MacIntyre a "communitarian" -- a label he rightfully rejects. What I would like to call this is a radical Augustinian Thomism and distinguish it from understandings of the church within the category of a type of "civil society." MacIntyre gives a description of the underlying dynamics and hopes and differences of what I believe God calls us to be about at Mid-City -- but not merely Mid-City, but the church catholic throughout the world. Congregations would indeed become the "pilgrim people of God" if we could embrace such a life lived in openness to the Spirit's sanctifying grace to form us into a holy people, a kingdom of priests.

Pagan critics of the early church called the gathering of those faithful to a crucified Jew named Jesus a “superstitio” -- “beliefs and practices that were foreign and strange to the Romans . . . the kinds of practices and beliefs associated with cults that had penetrated the Roman world from surrounding lands” (Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, p. 50). Roman elite contrasted such groups with Roman cults and sacrifices – a type of “religio” that was useful to sustain the Roman social order. True “religio” was “a patrimony from the past which sustains the life of the state” (p. 63). Of course, Christians did not accept the label of “superstitio” as a definition for themselves. They saw themselves, instead, as a “school of virtue.” As a result those who ruled the political order saw them as arrogant, self-righteous, and irrational yet the church endured according to its own polity, rather than have its inner life subordinated to the ruling politics of the day. Christians knew that their life as church needed to reflect the “city of God” rather than the “city of men” in which they dwelt as “aliens” and “pilgrims.”

In contrast Christians today seemingly have no trouble, consciously or unconsciously, accepting the definition of the church as a type of “civil society”. Such “faith-based” groups represent a type of organization useful to sustain the social order in a liberal democratic society. Yet I would argue that for Christians to accept such a definition fundamentally distorts the witness of a congregation and inoculates membership from the work of the Spirit necessary to bring forth the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love. The best meaning clergy and laity subtly shift the practices of the church to fit the definition of a civil society often with a Christian sounding vocabulary of “community” and “love” and “support” and “meeting needs” – all good things, if not co-opted by the false politics of the contemporary liberal political order.

Alasdair MacIntyre engages the moral and rational problems of “civil society” within liberal political orders in an essay called “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” (see The MacIntyre Reader, pp. 223-34). MacIntyre contrast the background understandings of activities of a group from within the political presuppositions of a “civil society”:
In activities governed by the norms of civil society there are no ends except those which are understood to be goals of some particular individual or individuals, dictated by the desires of those individuals, and no goods are recognized except those involved in the satisfaction of the wants and needs of individuals. Because there are many goods which individuals can achieve only by cooperative attention to the goods of others, civil society recognizes as common goods those goods which are pursued in common by individuals. But the only available conception of a common good is one constructed from the reducible to conceptions of the goods pursued by various individuals in their attempts to satisfy their desires” (p. 225). “The central conceptions informing thought within civil society about human relationships are therefore those of utility, of contract and of individual rights. And the moral philosophy which gives expression to the standpoint of civil society consists of a continuing debate about those concepts and how they are to be applied” (p. 223).

When congregations live as a civil-society, the social power of a congregation, either an entrepreneurial pastor and/or the invested “ownership laity” determines the needs that provides the common good for the congregation to pursue in contract (or “covenant”) with each other. If these needs are not met, then the utility of the congregation and its leadership are called into question. Either the congregation’s programs must be revised or the social contract is determined violated, leading in congregational dissatisfaction and/or departure.

MacIntyre insightfully gazes more deeply into the moral formation that goes on in civil society. Civil society demands a bifurcation between those who decide and service particular needs, and those who receive these services. MacIntyre writes, “Those who without abandoning the standpoint of civil society take themselves to know in advance what needs to be done to effect needed change are those who take themselves to be therefore entitled to manage that change. Others are to be the passive recipients of what they as managers effect. This hierarchical division between managers and managed is thus legitimated by the superior knowledge imputed to themselves by the managing reformers, who have cast themselves in the role of educator” (p. 231). If a congregation can find order between those who need to manage the services and those who need to receive the services, then it might achieve social equilibrium for awhile. If a different assessment of what needs deserve serviced arises or authority to manage the services becomes denied or disputed, then social disruption within the congregation will arise because it will be experienced as a violation of the social contract established.

Underlying this, however, is the fact that the church as a civil society does not require personal moral transformation, but instead, works to support individuals to function within the current liberal social status quo and the dysfunctions that it produces. Needs may be serviced, but the service has no other end than maintaining life within the society as it is, or allowing others to participate more fully in the liberal social order. The services quickly take on an individualistic therapeutic task to help individual’s cope with psychological discomfort and the anomie that the liberal social structures produce. Personal survival and satisfaction become the key ends of a congregation that operates as a part of civil society within a liberal social order. The congregation thereby becomes a significant cog in sustaining the social order of the nation-state, just as in the Roman empire, proper religio functions to sustain the order of the patronage system that was the Roman empire.

What then is the option? It is a return to the church as it was before modernity and liberalism colonialized it. It is the church as a revolutionary Thomistic school of virtue by engaging in the practices that reveal the church’s true nature. As Benedict XVI reminds us in Deus Caritas Est, “The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable”(para. 25). These objective practices provide the common good by which the Spirit sanctifies a congregation and thereby individuals within it to experience the perfect love that casts out fear. A communal pilgrimage, a trek for holiness, re-places a social contract for the fulfillment of therapeutic needs "in community."

Within this understanding, the central practices of a congregation are not open to negotiation according to the perceived needs of the group who decide to gather together for their own constructed common good. Activity is objectively ordered for the congregation by the Scriptures as lived out in the Christian tradition. As MacIntrye argues, objective activity has a common end of “universal worth” so that individuals who make this end their own “are able to achieve something of universal worth embodied in some particular form of practice through cooperation with other such individuals. The relationships required by this type of end are such that each individual’s achievement is both of the end and of what has become her or his own end” (p. 225). For the church this end is love of God and in God, love of neighbor. Only certain practices are conducive to this end, and these are objectively given in Scriptures. The "obedience of faith" becomes required in the journey to our true end in God.

Thus in the congregation as a school of virtue, the end comes first before the need, as the need must be defined in terms of the internal and external end of the activity. Such objective activities are antecedent and independent “of the desires of the particular individuals who happen to engage in it. Individuals discover in the ends of any such practice goods common to all who engage in it, goods internal to and specific to that particular type of practice, which they can make their own only by allowing their participation in the activity to effect a transformation in the desires which they initially brought with them to the activity” (pp. 225-26). Committing to such a congregation means committing to allowing one’s desires to be reshaped at their most basic level, thus requiring a moral transformation at the core of each and every person – with no bifurcation between the “managers” and the “managed.” The whole congregation must walk together, not to meet needs, but to reach the end of holiness, the love of God and neighbor, an end that comes only by the work of the Spirit as one engages in the objective practices of the gospel. Such a congregation requires attention, not to the current needs, but to those who have gone before us, Jesus Christ and the lives of the saints, as our educators: “This type of educator in respect of knowledge of the good with the activity involved in quite another kind of practice, one such that those engaged in its transform themselves and educate themselves through their own self-transformative activity, coming to understand their good as the good internal to that activity” (p. 231). The congregation’s authority lies in the office of the pastor/priest whose authority arises from fidelity to the gospel and the central practices of the congregation by which the Spirit can cleanse and sanctify its members to achieve the common good shared by all humanity, the Good that is the Triune God who is Love, through experiencing the internal good of love of God and neighbor that comes with the external, objective practices. “Thus in the course of doing whatever has to be done to achieve those goods, they also transform themselves through what is at once a change in their desires and an acquisition of those intellectual and moral virtues and those intellectual, physical and imaginative skills necessary to achieve the goods of that particular practice” (p. 226). The life of a congregation becomes an adventure in which God brings forth witnesses as members become able to participate more deeply and receive more profoundly the kingdom of God that comes to us only as gift.

This is a radical congregation, for it goes to the roots of living the gospel outside the mal-formation of the modern liberal democratic society that produces artificial entities like “civil societies.” From the outside, such a congregation might look like a civil society – or perhaps a cult because of the commitment of its members to have their desires completely reshaped by participation in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and the works of mercy! But those outside cannot gage what is going on, nor those who are committed to the church as a type of civil society. As MacIntrye writes, “What the objectivity of moral and other evaluative standards amounts to is to be understood only from within the context of and in terms of the structure of certain types of historically developed practice, in which the initial interests of those engaged in such practices are transformed through their activities into an interest in conforming to the standards of excellence required by those practices, so that the goods internal to them may be achieved. These are types of practice socially marginalized by the self-aggrandizing and self-protective attitudes and activities characteristic of developing capitalism, types of practice alien to the standpoint of civil society. But they are the types of practice within which moral thinking is put to the relevant practical tests and achieves objectivity” (p. 233).

Posted by johnwright at 8:16 PM | Comments (13)

I have found it fascinating that Transfiguration Sunday is followed by three straight Sundays with readings around John 6 -- the Johanine Eucharistic passages. Eucharistic teaching is difficult today. Any teaching is difficult because the liberal democratic society that has shaped us collapses all Christian teaching into the subjectivity of individuals or the collective subjectivity of a "community." To make normative claims sounds absolutist, totalitarian or at best a market-option for the consumptions of "personal beliefs" or "values." Of course, such a position masks the totalitarian claims of the categories of the liberal society that reduces Christian teachings to expressions of personal subjectivities. The post-Reformation differences in the teachings of various churches, of course, do not help the matter, nor does the Protestant revivalist tradition that shapes much of conservative Protestant evangelicalism in the US today.

I have earlier on this blog reminded us that the call to the Table in the Church of the Nazarene presupposes Christ's real presence in the consecrated bread and the cup -- and that early Nazarene's were required to partake in the elements while kneeling. Yet today I'd like to share from some an essay by Alexander Schmemann in his book For the Life of the World. Schmemann was an Eastern Orthodox theologian in the middle of the 20th century of great wisdom and insight. He reminds us that "In the early Church, in the writings of the Fathers, sacraments, inasmuch as they are given any systematic interpretation, are always explained in the context of their actual liturgical celebration, the explanation being, in fact, an exegesis of the liturgy itself in all its ritual complexity and concreteness" (p. 137). Schmemann reminds us that we cannot isolate our teaching about the Eucharist from the context within a concrete gathering of a people of God whose worship in Spirit and truth heads towards its end in the Eucharist. To understand Christ's presence in the Eucharist demands that we not isolate the Eucharist to merely "one particular activity" within a worship service.

In this essay Schmemann reminds us that modern categoris tend to place an either/or issue for Christ's presence in the Eucharist: it must be "real" versus "symbolic." But these terms distort the early Christian teachings. In early Christians "real" and "symbolic" stood together. Schmemann writes "symbol is a key to sacrament because sacrament is in continuity with the symbolic structure of the world . . . in virtue of its [the world] being created by God . . . the symbol being not only the way to perceive and understand reality, a means of cognition, but also a means of participation" (p. 139). To divorce cognition from participation, one's thoughts about the Eucharist from what really takes place in it, is a very modern move that leads to the fragmentation of Christian unity by separating the rites "meaning" from its "practice", the "private" from the "public". As soon as we allow ourselves to state the issue of Christ's Eucharistic presence in terms of "real" versus "symbolic" we will have lost. Thus the "absolute newness" that the Eucharist pre-sends is that it "reveals, manifests, and communicates . . . Christ and His Kingdom. . . . The 'mysterion' of Christ reveals and fulfills the ultimate meaning and destiny of the world itself" (p. 140). The Eucharist above all must be, not about our understanding, but about our participation in Christ as the One who initiates and will complete the Kingdom as He unifies the church. We cannot make "the identification, on the one hand, of symbol with means of knowledge, the reduction, on the other hand, of knowledge to rational and discursive knowledge about, rather than of reality" (p. 142).

The Eucharist, therefore, "is precisely the fulfillment of a symbol by Christ, and therefore, its transformation into a sacrament. It is thus an act . . of fulfillment and actualization. It is the epiphany -- in and through Christ -- of the 'new creation,' not the creation of something 'new.' And if it reveals the 'continuity' between creation and Christ, it is because there exists, at first, a continuity between Christ and creation whose logos, life, and light He is" (pp. 143-44). The Eucharist reveals Christ to us in our participation in Christ in the bread and wine, and thus conveys true knowledge about the nature of God, the world, and ourselves. Yet insofar as it does this, we cannot separate the Eucharist from the gathering of the congregation in the prayers and under the authority of the Word of God in Scriptures, a Word that calls the congregation to be a people among whom the poor are blessed, because theirs is the kingdom of God. It is in the sharing of the body and blood of Christ that we are rightfully empowered by the Spirit to witness to the world of God's kingdom in Christ. This is our need; this is the gift of God for the people of God.

Posted by johnwright at 11:58 AM | Comments (39)

The Gospel reading this week continues the study in the Gospel of John, chapter 6, the Johanine Eucharistic passage. It is wonderfully set in the midst of a speech of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs and the mention of wisdom in Ephesians 5. I will want to add some thoughts on the Eucharist later this week, particularly from Alexander Schmemann. But we need to come to terms with the radical Eucharistic, radical Christological center (this are indispensably tied together) from which the life of the church, and thus the life of the world, arises.

We probably need to talk about the difference between this Wisdom and the wisdom of the world. It seems to me that the center of the wisdom of "community," even a "spiritual community" as taught by the world today differs radically from what our readings suggest. Gianni Vattimo in a book After Christianity speaks about this "new" postmodern spirituality. In our world, he argues that "since God can no longer be upheld as an ultimate foundation, as the absolute metaphysical structure of the real, it is possible, once again, to believe in God" (p. 5). He goes one to talk about this "faith": "The concept of postmodern faith has nothing to do with the acceptance of strictly defined dogmas or with disciplines imposed by a single authority. The Church is certainly as important vehicle for revelation, but it is above all the community of believers who, in charity, hear and interpret freely the meaning of the Christian message, mutually helping and correcting one another. It is an idea of Church, found in many Romantic thinkers such as Novalis and Schleiermacher" (p. 8-9). In other words, there is no center outside the individual "religious experience" of individuals with common spiritual interests sharing with each other, who are free to share their own experiences with each other as they seek to accomodate themselves to their contemporary world and personal histories. It is a "pluralism without center" (p. 16).

This is a good thing for Vattimo that we should welcome with open arms (i.e., charity) with all the choices and "freedom" that we gain from the importance of experience that only we can judge as the source of wisdom. He writes, "If we do not welcome the appeal of aesthetic emancipation offered to us by the new condition of existence, it is because we are still oppressed by the letter – the literalism of the sacred texts (the fetish of fundamentalism of all sorts) and the world’s materiality, the unsatisfied needs and injustices in the distribution of goods that are indispensable to life" (p. 56). By denying the literalness of the biblical text and the significance of the world's materiality, we can find the joys of community without center in the pluralistic sharing and support for our experiences.

Now let's turn to our passages.

Proverbs 9:1-6

Lady Wisdom in a house owner and prominent person in this passage. What does Lady Wisdom do? What are her resources? (ie, the more pillars the bigger the house) Whom does she invite? To what? Why? To come in and dine, what must take place? Why? Why would the eating the bread of Wisdom leave immaturity behind? What is the difference between maturity and immaturity?

Ephesians 5:15-20

Why should we "be careful then how you live"? Why is wisdom important? Where does one find wisdom? Where does one find the "will of the Lord"? Where does foolishness arise? Why would the text substitute fulness of the Spirit as a replacement to drunkness with wine? How does this relate to "wisdom" and "foolishness"? Of coure, the word "giving thanks" is from the Greek root word, "eucharist," -- the giving of thanks. On sees, then, that this passage describes Christian worship as the center of Wisdom, with Eucharist (the allusion to wine) at the center. Why give thanks to "God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ"? Why is God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ the center of wisdom in thanksgiving?

John 6:53-59

What does Jesus allude to in this passage of eating his flesh and drinking his blood? Is this "symbolic" or "real" or neither or both? What happens in the eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood? When does eternal life for the believer take place? How does it take place? How is Jesus the Wisdom that one finds in Proverbs 9?

Now it might be good to compare the gathering of the spiritual community for Vattimo with that presupposed in John 6 and Ephesians 5 as mediated through Proverbs 9? What is necessary for us to leave immaturity behind and move to maturity? Why do we gather?

Have a wonderful discussion!

Posted by johnwright at 4:26 PM | Comments (9)

I've spent much of my summer reading to fill a massive hole in my theological education. Much of my education and work has taken place within the institutions of the Church of the Nazarene -- an evangelical "denomination" that has looked to become "mainline Protestant" in the past forty years by looking back to Wesley as Lutherans look to Luther and Reformed Christians look back to Calvin, all the while trying to accomodate his thought to categories given by modern world. Not only did this perspective influence what material was seen as important to read (Tillich over Barth, and if Barth, a Barth who was called a "dialectical, existential theologian"), but it also determined how certain events were presented to me: for instance, the Augustinian and the Thomistic as two fundamentally different types of Christian theology (drawn from an essay on "Two Types of Philosophy of Religion" by Tillich). Whereas I've recognized these inadequacies for years now, this summer has allowed me to begin to fill in the pieces in much more thorough ways through readings on Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, 20th century Roman Catholic thought, Vatican II, and Communio theologians, particularly as they related to those who first opened up the inadequacy, intellectual and ecclesial, of the categories given to me: persons like George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Wilken, and even John Howard Yoder.

Other than my personal biography, why is this important for anyone but myself?

I am convinced that my primary educational background fundamentally distorted our background in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement -- one cannot be committed to holiness and sanctification as an "evangelical-mainline Protestant denomination" -- holiness and sanctification belong necessarily within the context of the church catholic, or the concepts are merely caricatures. We have to come into conversation, shared traditions and readings, and shared life with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. This is an intellectual agenda, but not merely an intellectual agenda. If the failure of the World Council of Churches shows anything, it shows that when ecumenical discussions and events take place among a bureaucratic elite formed by an academic elice separated from the faithful in the world, such institutions will be coopted by political forces other than the church.

Personally, I plan to continue reading and begin to write in such areas, particularly about the relationships between the rebirth of "Wesleyan studies" and Vatican II and the opportunities that provides for persons in the Church of the Nazarene and the holiness movement to understand ourselves within the faith given to the saints rather than as an American denomination with a worldwide franchise. But pastorally this is important for us as well at Mid-City.

Our mission statement concludes by highlighting three practices as the core of our nature as the church: (1) the preaching of the Gospel; (2) the sharing of the Sacraments; and (3) service with and among the poor. The obvious parallel to Benedict XVI's statement in Deus Caritas Est that "The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable. For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being" (sec. 25). If I read this parallel correctly, it is precisely those who take Benedict's teaching most seriously will be those among whom we will find the deepest partnership for the journey. The parallel is not accidental, but comes from the shared font of the faith given to the saints between the Wesleyan-holiness movement as a movement always necessarily within the church catholic. This is also why it is no accident that members of our congregation have found such a hospitable home in working with and among Catholic Charities.

Yet we have obstacles to overcome. One is that we tend to segment our threefold practices from each other, and thus, find affiliation in common works distinct from the particularity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and joint participation in the sacraments. Second are deep historical and cultural barriers that keep this commonality from coming to bear.

It is here that the relationship of thought and life between Karl Barth and Hans Urs van Balthasar have much to teach us. I have begun reading, at the exhortation of my friend, Ken Oakes, Balthasar's book The Theology of Karl Barth in order to understand the deep conversations in which Barth, represented to me in my education as the "Reformed theologian par excellance" with mid-twentieth Century Roman Catholicism. Balthasar's book was written in 1951, but it describes very well the situation today between American evangelicals and "conservative" Roman Catholics. Balthasar speaks as a Catholic to Catholics in Chapter 2 of the book, admonishing those to an openness in conversations with Protestants. He reminds us that "If all heresy is a form of one-sidedness, this forces the Church to reply with an emphatically one-sided counterstatement of her own" (p. 13), but that this is not good. He quotes Yves Congar, "When faced with a one-sided distortion of the truth, the Church must do more than simply emphasize the other, equally partial, side of the same truth" (p. 13).

Yet Balthasar says important things that accurately, and negatively, define Protestants relationship to Roman Catholics, even after over 50 years that he has written. He writes, 'Protestants are convinced that they have seen through Catholicism once and for all; and if it should so happen that they discover a presentation of Catholic views that they do not find absurd, this must surely be due to the Catholic habit of countenancying "Jesuitical' arguments, hiding the Church's true esoteric features behind politically shrewd and seductive masks" (p. 17). He concludes his observations, "And the result is that, if sloth and inattention hinder conversations on the Catholic side, mistrust and suspicion cripple it on the Protestant" (p. 18).

Yet Balthasar states that "perhaps today we are beginning to move beyond the era of stale antithese -- Reformation and Counter-Reformation -- with Catholics trying to be more catholic and not 'anti-Protestant' and the Protestants more biblical and 'evangelical' and not 'protesters'" (p. 19). Fifty years later we still await this to fully materialize, despite tremendous movements on various fronts. Yet for it to come to full fruition, such a movement must have a base in the common life of the faithful, rather than in ecclesial bureaucracies or the isolated reflections of an academic elite speaking to each other who do not shirk from the fundamental commitment to the fact that "the Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable."

Posted by johnwright at 7:29 AM | Comments (9)

The order in which we hear these passages make a big difference. Do the OT and Epistle readings lead to and "activate" the Gospel reading or is it the Gospel reading that elevates and enables and illuminates the OT and Epistle reading? Let me explain.

If one begins with the OT, moves into the Epistle, and then to the Eucharistic images of the Gospel of John, the Eucharist, Jesus present as bread to eat, becomes the result of the social reality of the human community that we produced through our obedience. Community becomes more basic than Christ's Eucharistic presence. Christ's presence in the sacrament is fundamentally memorial, not real -- or real because it's memorial. Christ is manifested in the church as the gather at the Table. This is a common way that people from radical Protestant groups such as Mennonites tend to live such readings.

While there is some truth to this understanding, this is a very dangerous for a congregation's practice of life together celebrated in Jesus as Bread. Such an understanding makes the Christ's presence in the Eucharist the result of the church as community as a type of incubation ritual. As the church, we make Christ present to the world. Works produce grace; humans make God. The Eucharist becomes something like rituals understood by an important French sociologist Emile Durkheim who argued that "rituals" provide the unifying projection of communities -- the church makes the Eucharist through its solidarity. It reduces the Eucharist to a sociological reality; if this sociological reality is not there, the Eucharist is not valid because it cannot symbolize the unity of the community.

But the church does not make the Eucharist; the Eucharist makes the Church. As Christians, grace comes before works, and works flow out of what the grace has already accomplished. The Eucharist represents the "already" as we live towards its full reality in the "not yet." Christ's presence in the Eucharist is real by the descent of the Spirit on the Bread and Cup in the Eucharistic prayer lead by the elder at the altar. As we participate in the One Body that is Christ's presence in the Bread, we then go out to live what we read in Deuteronomy and Ephesians -- now with no reason to not do so, because it is only by God's grace, not our merit or worth, that we have been made participatants in Christ's body.

This may sound esoteric, but it is important for us. By placing an emphasis on "community" as lived in the "Eucharist", we subtly shift the center of the faith to human relationships and demands that are made upon each other. Community becomes more central than Christ, as Christ's presence depends on community. Ironically, it makes community much more difficult to live out because we spend energy trying to keep everyone's demands met, rather than living for the presence of Christ among the poor in direct action. We can fragment because of disappointments of "lack of community" end up severing the community. In the culture of white middle class America, community bears psychological therapeutic weight for getting through "tough times" or for having me recognized for the gifts that I bring into a group of people. Community is forced to be its own end, and cannot bear the weight of the expectations.

The Good News is that the Church as a community is a a reality already formed in Christ's presence in the Eucharist. It is not formed for its own sake, but for the sake of Christ's presence found as we engage in the works of mercy in witness to the world. In other words, the social reality of the church as community happens, whether we actualize it or not, in the
Bread that is Jesus Christ is the Eucharist. The community is a necessity for us to engage in the witness as the church formed by the Eucharist in the world. Our center is Jesus Christ, sent from the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit, incarnate two thousand years ago in Palestine, and made really present among us by the Father's gift of the Spirit descending on the bread and the cup in the Eucharist, participated in by faith for those baptized.

I hope that this is not too confusing. I hope that it helps read the Scriptures. I will reverse the Scriptures here, starting with the Gospel. What was the purpose for the manna in the wilderness? What is that "manna" in Jesus' teaching? What is the relationship between Christ's incarnation and eating his flesh today? What is the result of eating Jesus as bread?

John 6:37-51

Start reading at the end: "I am the bread of life." Don't miss the Sacramental images or the images of feeding the hungry as a result.

Now go back and read the first part of the passage. Why did the Father send Jesus? What did the Father send Jesus as? For what end or purpose? What is objectionable about this? How does Jesus meet the objections?

Ephesians 4:(25-29)30-5:2

In our culture it is easy to read this as a list of rules -- which, in some way, they are. Yet it can be reduced as well to a certain type of "niceness". What is the role of truthfulness in the instructions? Why? Why should all work? What is "evil talk"?

If you notice, the passage presumes "bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice" is present, but needs to be "put away". Why is it to be put away (notice that it is about God in Christ to us, not for us). What is the most basic reality that provides the potential to live these instructions? What is the result of a congregation that might live this way? How would it handle disputes and conflicts?

Deuteronomy 8:1-10

Finally, what is the purpose of keeping the commandments? What must one remember? What is the role of remembering God's graciousness? What is the purpose of keeping these commandments? For us, what and where is the manna that is talked about in this passage after reading the Gospel passage.

Have a wonderful evening. If you want additional dialogue, let me know!

Posted by johnwright at 11:24 AM | Comments (4)

We've snuck away for a few days as a family -- a welcome respite from the constant demands of the parish and the academy. Sure, I have some books with me -- but included in them is the science fiction book, Eragon. Of course, we made sure the hotel had "free" wireless internet. But my cell phone is off, and I'm listening to Johnny's, Tony's, and Carl's beautiful laughs in the background as they watch some stupid movie. Tasha and Kathy are out at a book store -- what more can one ask? I may be back asleep for a nap within a half hour.

Yet I remain in prayer and plagued by the escalations of war and how the current United States governing regime and their support from US conservative protestant Christians continues to diminish the significance of human life for their geo-political-economic agenda. Congregations of the Church of the Nazarene in Lebanon continue to suffer. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries has means of living in solidarity with these congregations that we have to take up -- as do some persons at the American University in Beirut --now cut off by Israeli bombings. Hezbollah as well has escalated the situation by the numbers of missiles sent off. Meanwhile, Iraq continues to be a place of mayhem of death, as the numbers of US troops there rises.

The situation reminded me of a statement by Benedict XVIth that he made on his vacation from Roma earlier this week. Please read the following from zenit.org/english:

"In this moment I cannot help think of the situation, ever more grave and more tragic, that the Middle East is going through: hundreds of dead, many wounded, a huge number of the homeless and refugees; houses, towns and infrastructure destroyed; meanwhile, hatred and the desire for revenge grow in the hearts of many.

These facts demonstrate clearly that you cannot re-establish justice, establish a new order and build authentic peace when you resort to instruments of violence.

More than ever we see how prophetic and altogether realistic is the voice of the Church when, in the face of wars and conflicts of every kind, it points out the path of truth, justice, love and liberty (cf. encyclical "Pacem in Terris"). Humanity must also cross this path today to achieve the good desire for true peace.

In the name of God, I appeal to all those responsible for this spiral of violence, so that they immediately put down their weapons on all sides! I ask governing leaders and international organizations not to spare any effort to obtain this necessary halt to hostilities and so to be able to begin to build, through dialogue, a lasting and stable concord for all the people of the Middle East.

I appeal to all people of good to continue and to intensify the shipment of humanitarian help to those populations so tested and needy. But especially [I ask that] every heart continue to raise the hopeful prayer to the good and merciful God, so that he grants his peace to that region and to the whole world."

First, we have to recognize the direct repudiation of the official US doctrine of pre-emptive war as a means of peace in this statement. Instruments of violence do not build security or peace. The US regime stated policy runs fundamentally counter to traditional Christian teaching. Christians cannot support this regime as long as it pursues this policy, nor any other national regime that pursues such an agenda.

Second, the Pope's appeal to work for an immediate cease-fire has been directly repudiated by the President of the United States without real challenge from any political opposition. The US continues to supply weaponry to Israel and rumors persist that certain forces in the US have encouraged Israel to expand the conflict to Syria. The US remains the largest political force that seeks to establish peace through violence, against all empirical evidence to the contrary.

Finally, there is guidance here for us: to engage in humanitarian aide for all those in Israel and Lebanon who are suffering from the violence and to pray. This has gone on long enough. We need to accept the "realistic" "voice of the Church" in finding ways to work around the politics of statecraft that only know of their own means of peace through violence, and thus never know peace. We need to find ways ourselves of being the church, of building creative institutions that do not seek to influence the violence of states, but work for peace.

It might even be that such "terrorist" Islamic groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah can give us some clues on how to organize options to the liberal nation-state. Yet as Christian, of course, we cannot accept such group's use of violence and coercion to reach their ends of opposing nation-states. By adopting violent tactics, such groups merely duplicate the nation-state at its worst point -- in the process legitimating the liberal nation-state to those already committed to it.

Yet it seems to me that Christians have much to learn from such groups. We need to develop international networks as "non-violent radical Christians" to call into question the legitimacy of such liberal democratic regimes, to start forming means of works of mercy and justice within such societies that do not depend on the ideology nor the patronage of the civil and political structures of the state. We need to do this especially as resident aliens of the United States, persons whose citizenship is in heaven, not in the perpetual violence of the state.

Posted by johnwright at 10:07 AM | Comments (36)

Transfiguration Sunday jumps out at us in the midst of the "normal times" of the Christian year. One sees in the Scriptures the "slendour of the Lord" -- the visible transfiguring of earhly reality by the Divine showing through. The texts lead and witness to the Gospel text concerning the transfiguration of Jesus. Amidst days of war, violence, green house warming, poverty, we remember that our hope is in the God who transfigures, not merely transforms, reality. God lifts and elevates nature to its true end as the manifestation of God.

Exodus 34:29-35

This passage ends the whole difficult unit from Exodus 32 on. The sinfulness of Israel at the very point when God was given Torah to Moses bears a deep analogy to our lives. Yet the idolatry and subsequent violence within Israel is not the last word here. The broken first tablets do not end God's promise to Israel. Moses again goes up the mounting. Compare Moses first coming down from the mountain with this coming down. Where the Israelites afraid the first time? Why now? Why does Moses veil himself? What does the "glowing" of Moses face indicate? How is it related to Torah, the giving of the Law?

2 Peter 1:13-21

Why would the repetition of the story of the transfiguration be toldin the context of the prediction of Peter's death? What is it about death that points back to Jesus' transfiguration?

What is recalled in the restatement of the transfiguration narrative? What is important to the writer?

How does this story confirm "the prophetic message"? What would be then the "morning start that rises in our hearts"? How does this relate to how the passage begins.

Luke 9:28-36

Notice the Gospel reading also has Jesus, Moses, and Elijah speaking of Jesus' departure. How does the heavenly voice differ from Peter in his suggestions on what they should do? Why? What is the difference? Who is Jesus here, especially given the other passages?

The following was taken off a web site of Ss. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church (http://www.sspeterpaul.org/transfiguration.htm): Discuss it and how it relates to our passages.

"God became as we are so that we may become as He is. St. Peter greets the Church: "Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our LORD, according as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust." (II Peter 1:2-4). We are called to this vision of divinity, and this participation in the Divine life because we are called to be really human instead of merely human; and to be really human is be a meeting point where the presence of God shines forth to a dark, broken and sinful world -- just as Jesus Christ was and is."

Have a wonderful time together!

Posted by johnwright at 1:51 PM | Comments (3)

After various stops and starts, I finished David L. Schindler's book, Heart of the World, Center of the Church last night. Schindler develops a devastating intellectual and cultural critique of Christian accomodation to political liberalism from within the "Communio" movement. The book, written in 1996, draws deeply upon the interpretation of Vatican II given by John Paul II, and especially applies the thought of Hans Urs van Balthasar to an American context.

In its central Christological commitment and anti-liberalism, Schindler's work reminds me of the work of Stanley Hauerwas. Yet in its Catholic background, Schindler devotes much more time to speculative metaphysical arguments than Hauerwas and develops a doctrine of analogy in a way that softens some of Hauerwas' analysis, which is intentionally more polemic as the Hauerwas text comes from within mainline American Protestantism. A reader might find great benefit in reading the two theologians in tandem.

The Communio school of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism also has a robust doctrine of holiness as the true end of the human being. It seeks to address the contemporary world from within the deepest convictions and insights afforded by the Christian tradition. It desires to reclaim culture, especially the claim that in that the Triune God is Love, love remains -- and must remain -- the fundamental background of all human cultural life. In so far as Western culture has left Love and substituted an instrumental rational control as fundamental, Schindler deepens our understanding of the ills that attend our society -- seen, for instance, in the refusal of the Bush administration to call for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. Human life is instrumental to the need for social control. War and death are "birth pangs" to quote Condeleeza Rice, necessary to bring about a free market, liberal democratic MIddle East. This is the cultural of death.

Schindler ends his book with a very nicely written conclusion. I would like to leave this with you for your contemplation:

"Christian mission takes form from within Christ's mission. Christ emptied himself into the world in its entirety, in order that the world might be reconciled with the Father. This, then, is the heart of the spousal union brought about in the eucharist: Jesus Christ enters us, so that we might thereby enter Christ, taking on his form and being brought into communion with the Father . . .; and so that we might in turn carry this form into the world, and help bring the world into communion with the Father.

Thus we have the primary meaning of liberation. God in Jesus Christ entered into every aspect of human being, with its temptations, its fears, its joys and aspiractions, even its sin (without of course sinning himself), in order that all of human being might be liberated through spousal union: ever-deeper penetration of the form of Christ into our being, to the end of communion with the Father. The only way of this transforming liberaion, which is above all a conversion from sin, is the way of the cross. This liberation and transformation will be complete only in heaven. . . . .

'Let it be done according to your word' (Luke 1:38): the phrase indicates an inexhaustibly rich range of dispositions that must inform any Christian spirituality: a disposition of receptivity toward God, as the condition for giving birth to God; of contemplation and interiority ('taking within'), as the condition for creativity ('going out'); a disposition of prayer (making a home for God) and of poverty (emptying oneself before God); of wonder at the gift of being -- and thus of humility ('the Almighty has done great things for me' [Luke 1:49]; a suffering disposition that already anticipates a passion: a willingness to bear the other (Christ) for the other (Christ), unto death." pp.312-13

Posted by johnwright at 8:24 AM | Comments (26)